Captain Marty Brill is a natural-born storyteller, and if you want to hear an Outer Banks fishing story, he's the perfect person to ask. He tells a story well – setting it up clearly, building suspense, putting in just the right details – but more importantly, he has a head full of them – a huge repertoire of fishing-related tales just waiting to be told.
His life has given him plenty of fish-tale fodder. Growing up in Florida, Marty worked as a bait boy on a headboat starting in the fifth grade and later spent years working as a mate. The very night he graduated from high school he kissed his parents goodbye and drove his van straight to Hatteras, where his goal was to catch a blue marlin – and he did by the end of that summer. That was in the 1970s and he has lived on Outer Banks ever since, fishing or working in fisheries his whole life, as a charter fishing mate and captain, a commercial fisherman, a tackle shop owner and a port agent with N.C. Marine Fisheries.
“I just happened to pass through the fleet in the best of times,” he says of being a recreational captain on the Outer Banks. “Back when a captain could afford to own his own boat, I got to fish with all the legends and then the new up-and-coming guys. I really have lived the dream.”
Capt. Marty’s life and surroundings have given him a lot of adventures – long battles with giant fish, boat building, survival at sea, cooking fish, hunting deer and so many other topics of big adventure. But he can make even ordinary events interesting when he tells about them.
“My friends say I can’t cross the street without something happening to me,” Marty says. “And I can always make a story out of it.”
Somehow Capt. Marty remembers it all. He does not write any of his stories down, yet he always has a story at the ready. And if someone reminds of him a story he has not told in a while, all the details come flooding back.
Capt. Marty shared his stories on local radio for the last 25 years, gathering a dedicated following of listeners along the way. Now he is shifting gears from radio and is headed over to Outer Banks This Week to start a new podcast called Capt. Marty's Outer Banks Fishing Reports and Stories. He will also get back to publishing Capt. Marty's Outer Banks Fishing Guide, a handy booklet that details all the Outer Banks fishing possibilities, which he has published for 19 years.
To give us a taste of what’s to come on his new podcast, I asked Capt. Marty to tell me a story. Without hesitation, he had three fascinating stories at the ready. I’m going to re-tell this one about the time he misplaced his mate. But rest assured, when Marty tells it on the podcast it’s going to be much better.
“This story is hard to tell, but it has led a lot of people to be safer on their boats so I will tell it,” he says.
Man Overboard
In 1985, Capt. Marty was captain of the 57’ Reelin’. He had a really good mate, but his friend Mickey Hayes asked him if he would mind if the nephew of a friend rode out with them for the entire summer as a second mate. The guy was Brad Coors, grandson of the owner of Coors Brewery.
Capt. Marty said yes, and Brad came. “He was a pleasure. A good guy and he appreciated the chance,” Capt. Marty says.
On the day of the private Ducks Unlimited Fishing Tournament that summer, Capt. Marty’s first mate had an appointment and could not be on board. That day the Reelin’ was taking out just one angler – the organizer of the tournament. Capt. Marty asked Brad if he could handle the job of mate that day, and he said he believed he could. “I had the confidence he could too,” Marty says.
The one angler on the boat asked to come up to the flybridge to ride with Capt. Marty. Marty says he usually would not allow this. Ordinarily, he wanted to be up there alone so he could listen to the radio and concentrate on what the other captains were saying. “You’ve got to listen to know where the fish are being caught,” Marty says.
But because the angler was alone, Capt. Marty let him come up. “The guy was a real talker. He would not stop talking and I could not concentrate or hear anything on the radio about whether to go north or south,” Marty says.
Due to the tournament organizer’s duties, the Reelin’ was the last boat to go out that day. Plus, Marty says, the boat was slow. “We were already behind so I just went the shortest route, due east,” he says.
More than an hour later, just as they were almost to the Continental Shelf and getting ready to slow down to fish, the angler was about to leave the flybridge when Capt. Marty got a call from Garry Oliver, a captain who was taking a private charter of Coast Guard guys out fishing that day.
“Marty, how you doing?” Garry asked.
“Great, it’s a beautiful day,” Marty said.
“Sure is,” Garry said. “How’s your mate doing?”
“He’s fine. He’s down there cutting bait.”
“Are you sure? Have you seen him? You better go look.”
Marty says he felt the blood rush out of his body.
His mate was not on the boat.
Garry Oliver had just pulled him out of the ocean, where he had been floating on an upturned bucket for the last hour and fifteen minutes.
What happened was that down in the cockpit, Brad was having trouble with the saltwater washdown hose to clean up the mess from the bait. He didn’t want to bother the captain and the angler, so he decided to fill a bucket with sea water to wash down the deck. He tied a 25-foot-long rope to the bucket handle and lowered the bucket into the ocean. With the boat going at cruising speed, the pressure of the water immediately yanked the bucket and all the line into the water, and unfortunately, Brad Coors was standing in the loop on the long rope and was immediately flipped overboard as well.
He screamed, but Capt. Marty could not hear him over the roar of the engine. “Plus, I was distracted by the angler,” Capt. Marty says.
Brad kicked off his shoes and floated on the upturned bucket, trying to swim to a nearby tower, not realizing he was swimming against the current and going nowhere.
More than an hour later, Garry Oliver came by with his fishing party. He and his party had also had a late start, so they too were headed due east toward the Continental Shelf. They saw the bucket in the water, and knowing that dolphin (mahi) will hang around floating objects, they went over to see if they could catch one.
That’s when they saw the arms waving from the bucket.
“They were not following me,” Capt. Marty says. “I was well ahead of them, already over the horizon. They had just happened to go due east too.”
Miraculously, everything turned out OK. “Even so, I was so sick. I almost wanted to turn around and go back in,” Marty says. “But once he was back on board, Brad was apologizing and wanted to go on. We made it through the day of fishing, and he kept riding out with us the rest of that summer.”
To hear more of Capt. Marty's tales and adventures tune in and subscribe to Capt. Marty's Outer Banks Fishing Reports and Stories on your favorite podcast apps.
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About the Author Molly Harrison
Molly Harrison is managing editor at OneBoat, publisher of OuterBanksThisWeek.com. She moved to Nags Head in 1994 and since then has made her living writing articles and creating publications about the people, places and culture of the Outer Banks.
